ARELLANO-FELIX ARREST JUST ONE BATTLE IN AMERICA'S FAILED DRUG WAR

BACK in the early 1960s, I often sneaked into Mexico at the San
Diego-Tijuana border. Too young to cross legally, I'd coil up in the
trunk of Charlie Romero's '54 Merc. My buddies and I would head
straight for the notorious Blue Fox to guzzle Carta Blancas, shoot
Cuervo Gold, and take in the "adult entertainment" acts. This was not
all Mexico had to offer, of course. And it was sexist and
exploitative, not something I'd want my own kid doing. Yet the
frontera of Mexico felt safe, even for a 16-year-old.

But that's all changed now.

From Tijuana to Matamoros, drug gang violence along the U.S.-Mexico
border has taken the lives of thousands cops, soldiers, drug dealers,
often their families, other innocent citizens from both sides of the
border. Even a cardinal of the Catholic Church. Many others have gone
missing and are presumed dead.

In the mid-'90s, the Arellano drug cartel ruled Tijuana, perched atop
the hierarchy of Mexico's multibillion dollar illegal drug-trafficking
industry. Using cars, planes, and trucks and an intimate knowledge of
the North American Free Trade Agreement the Arellanos transported
hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine
into American cities.

They enlisted U.S. drug gangs. In 1993, in my last days as San Diego's
assistant police chief, "Calle Treinte," a local gang, was implicated
in the Arellano-inspired killing of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo.

The Arellanos bribed officials on both sides of the border, spending
more than $75 million annually on the Mexican side alone, to grease
their illicit trafficking.

And they enforced their rule not just with murder but with
torture.

If Steven Soderbergh's gritty 2000 film "Traffic" caused you to squirm
in your seat, the real-life story of Mexican drug dealing is even more
disquieting.

The brothers once kidnapped a rival's wife and children; with
videotape running, they tossed two of the kids off a bridge, then sent
their competitor a copy of the tape along with the severed head of the
man's wife. Another double-crosser had his skull crushed in a
compression vice.

And who can forget the "carne asada" barbecues, where the Arellanos
would roast entire families over flaming tires?

Recently, the bodies of four men, three of them cops, were found
wrapped in blankets in Rosarito Beach. Their heads showed up in Tijuana.

Corruption of public officials, useful to sustain and grow illicit
drug trafficking everywhere, has always run deep in Mexico. But with
the country now having supplanted Colombia as the biggest supplier of
illegal drugs to the U.S., and with annual profits topping $65 billion
a year, the numbers of federal, state and local cops on the take has
never been greater.

Drug criminals have an unlimited supply of high-powered weapons at
their disposal. Kingpins pay mules, usually impoverished, always
expendable, to travel to the States and pick up a firearm or two at a
gun show. Using the Brady Bill "loophole" (and congressional and
presidential failure to extend the ban on assault rifles), all it
takes is a phony stateside driver's license and a handful of cash to
walk out with semiautomatic Uzis, AR-15s and AK-47s.

Last June in Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas,
Alejandro Dominguez was sworn in as the city's police chief. That same
day, three dark Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows pulled up to his
office. Moments later, Dominguez, a reluctant top cop who only took
the job at the pleading of a terrified citizenry, was dead. Police
recovered 35 to 40 casings from an AR-15 assault rifle.

"Zetas" (elite military commandos assigned to fight drugs but who've
gone over to the other side), are among the most organized, proficient
and prolific killers in history.

The violence does not end with the capture or the killing of major
players like the Arellano boys. (Ramon was shot and killed by the
federales in February 2002. Brother Benjamin was captured a month
later. And the drug family's current leader, Francisco Javier
Arellano-Felix, was busted earlier this month while deep-sea fishing
off La Paz.)

As with the illicit drug scene in the U.S., thousands of low-level
drug-dealing wannabes are marking time waiting for today's kingpin to
fall so they can move up.

And the violence grows and grows.

Virtually every analysis of the Mexican "drug problem" points to the
themes raised here: The inducements of big money and wide fame; the
crushing poverty of those exploited by drug dealers; the
entrepreneurial frenzy of expanding and protecting one's markets; the
large, unquenchable American demand for drugs; and the complicity of
many in law enforcement.

But something's missing from the analysis: The role of
prohibition.

Illegal drugs are expensive precisely because they are illegal. The
products themselves are worthless weeds cannabis (marijuana), poppies
(heroin), coca (cocaine) or dirt-cheap pharmaceuticals and
"precursors," used, for example, in the manufacture of
methamphetamine. Yet today, marijuana is worth as much as gold, heroin
more than uranium, cocaine somewhere in between. It is the U.S.'s
prohibition of these drugs that has spawned an ever-expanding
international industry of torture, murder and corruption. In other
words, we are the source of Mexico's "drug problem."

The remedy is as obvious as it is urgent: legalization.

Regulated legalization of all drugs with stiffened penalties for
driving impaired or furnishing to kids would bring an immediate halt
to the violence.

How? By dramatically reducing the costs of these drugs, shifting
massive enforcement resources to prevention and treatment, and driving
drug dealers out of business.

No product, no profit, no incentive.

In the ideal world, Mexico and the U.S. would move to repeal
prohibition simultaneously (along with Canada). But even if we moved
unilaterally, sweeping and lasting improvements to public safety and
public health would be felt on both sides of the border.

(Tragically and predictably, just as Mexico's parliament was about to
reform its U.S.-modeled drug laws, the Bush administration stepped in,
pressuring President Vicente Fox to abandon the enlightened position
he'd championed for two years.)

With drugs stringently controlled and regulated by our own government,
Mexico would once again become a safe, inviting place for American
tourists and for its own citizens, who pay the steepest price of all
for our insistence on waging an immoral, unwinnable war on drugs.

Norm Stamper is former chief of the Seattle Police Department and an
advisory board member of the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.